Equivocality

If I got the offer I would go instantly. I’d pack up everything and nothing and leave next week, or probably tomorrow. Even if I could never come back. Maybe especially if I couldn’t. I want to see the Solar System that badly.

Yeah, the technology, the adventure, the leap into the unknown is exciting. But I’ve always imagined turning off my radio at the end of the day, unplugging from Earth and having the cold planet all to myself for a little while in the dusk light. Boots crunching on the dry-ice frost, I’d sit down a rock and look at the sky.

And probably see something like this NASA video of drifting dust in the night-time Martian sky.

These images make me suddenly lonely, happy, and hopelessly yearning all at once.

Varanasi is perhaps what I thought I might find in India. The ghats (wharves) are— well. Hindus and painted faces and temples and cows and signs painted on the narrow alleyways, and elaborate lacy (Moghul influenced?) architecture, and stone streets, and everywhere filth and garbage and exuberance. Walking along the ghats in the evening, reveling […]

My god, it’s like lace reaching into the sky! I mean, I’d seen pictures, but this, actually standing here in Durbar Square, Katmandu, watching the pagodas silhouette the dawn– it’s a fairy tale. This place can’t be real. Here, let’s climb the steps. Oh. There’s graffiti at the top. The sun rises, shadows form. The traffic arrives with first light. Suddenly the square is filled with belching diesels and kids on scooters, and vendors selling cotton candy and mobile phones. Also illuminated is every other building, the surrounding sprawl of hideous brick boxes. Katmandu, 21st Century. The pagodas cower before the hot, flat, smoggy light of the present time.

Calcutta you are motion! Calcutta you are noise and smoke and all the impolite truths of humanity stacked on top of each other in one place. You are sound and light and fresh fruit juice, a man yelling mango juice mangojuice mangojuice! into the crowd on the corner. Step right up and get your slice of life! There’s nowhere to run anyway. The streets are packed with cars and carts and bicycles and rickshaws and pedestrians, and usually no sidewalks. The sidewalks are for sleeping on.

The Inheritance of Loss is magnificent. The writing is lovely, but what makes the book great is the fearlessness with which the author addresses the strange and difficult intermixing of rich and poor, white and brown and black, husband and wife, Hindu and Muslim, tribe versus tribe, not just in India but internationally, through the experience of foreign students and illegal immigrants. This book is fundamentally about the way people see each other through their differences, and like any truly good book it’s full of moments where you go, "yes, it’s like that." The difference here is that these moments make you cringe a little to see something ugly so revealed, both in others and yourself.

We were halfway down the beach when K. started coming up. Past Dreamcatcher, before that next big one with the unfortunate name – what was it? Cock’s Town? Sometimes the Indians miss the mark, and you have to admit, it’s pretty funny. It was New Year’s Eve in Goa, and we could do anything.

Not just the ability to have many books at the same time, but the actual books themselves, stacked vertically, the titles popping out at me every time I walk past, begging to be read. After that, probably hot water. Hot water, and good food. “Solid food,” I’ve begun to call it. Did you know that most of the world eats mush? Or rice. Mush with rice is also popular.

Now they were standing face to face on the steps, a meter apart. He wondered if was unusual or suspicious for a woman alone to talk to a strange man in public. The capital cities were usually more liberal, but there was no way to know for sure.

There are myths to travel. There are mythic voyages of the ones who went before. A long time ago, somebody rode a motorcycle all through Indonesia, and then spent four months in a crumbling room in Jakarta penning the very first Lonely Planet. We all want to be that person, every last backpacking one of […]

St. Petersburg is gray and opulent. It’s splendid and magnificent, a beautiful imperial city that even 80 years of communism and eight months of sunless winter can’t completely disguise. It’s also falling apart, slightly shabby, and strangely ordinary at street level. It wants to be grand, but it isn’t, not quite. Something isn’t quite […]